Trawling the ICW, day 7
Okay, imagine this... Someone is up on the flying bridge steering theboat, and someone is down below in the main cabin messing around with some chore (like eating massive amounts of goodies from the galley). Suddenly, the guy upstairs needs some help. Maybe it's a navigational crisis, or worse yet, maybe the guy on top has a sudden craving for another chocolate chip cookie. How does the guy upstairs signal the guy downstairs to come up to the flying bridge? I suppose on a monster yacht there is an intercom of some sort, but on Sea Smoke we used "TOCP", the Tony Orlando Communications Protocol (knock three times on the ceiling if you want me). Crude, but cost effective, and entirely functional.Today we passed another sailboat stuck in the mud. The more I traveled down the ICW, the more I congratulated myself for not trying to bring my own sailboat down this waterway. There are several bridges that my mast would not fit under, and some of these bridges are permenent (no lifting mid section). But, even if you got rid of all the bridges, my boat would still hate the ICW, and the reason is shallow water. We passed two sailboats on our journey south, both of them hard aground, and both of them IN THE MARKED CHANNEL. If you draw more than 4' you need to be careful, and if you draw more than 5 feet you need to be exceptionally careful, and if you draw more than 6 feet, thou art screwed. The Skipper Bob web site has some good updates on where the shallowest of the shallows can be found, but the bottom line is that the ICW is damn shallow in spots.
On my one and only trip down the ICW bewteen Charleston and Palm Beach, I did not pass one tug/barge combination. That tells me that the lion's share of ICW traffic is recreational, and THAT tells me that the states and the federal government will be less than enthusiastic when it comes to allocating money to dredge the ICW channels. This is not to say that your big sailboat can not enjoy any of the ICW. But, that big sailboat is not going to be able to enjoy ALL of the ICW. There are portions of the ICW where your big sailboat simply won't fit, and for those sections you should plan to go offshore.
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